Here is a letter from a Manchester Socialist Resistance supporter to his local SWP branch. He begins by thanking them for organising a meeting to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution and goes on to explore the idea of democratic centralism. If you want to leave comments on it please save your thoughts on state capitalism and bureaucratically deformed workers’ states for our Christmas special on the theme. There’s something to look forward to!
Open Letter to Manchester SWP
Comrades,
Thank you for organising Thursday’s public meeting on the 90th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution, something which is well worth celebrating.
Both Chris Nineham and Colin Barker mentioned some of the disagreements that had wracked the Bolshevik party during 1917. If anything, they understated the extent of those disagreements. The entire central committee maintained, prior to Lenin’s return in April, that socialist revolution simply wasn’t on the cards in Russia, at least until such time as capitalism had been allowed to develop the productive forces, and hence the relative social weight of the working class. As Chris pointed out, the majority of the population were peasants, and the economy was the most backward in Europe .
Trotsky had developed a different analysis, based on his experiences in 1905. But of course he wasn’t a member of the Bolsheviks at that time, and only joined the party after Lenin’s return. Trotsky argued that the bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying out even the democratic tasks of its own revolution, that the role of leadership fell to the working class (at the head of the peasantry) and that in taking power the workers would not halt the revolution at its bourgeois democratic stage, but would allow it to pass over uninterruptedly into a socialist revolution (i.e. in the words of Marx, one that would make despotic inroads into private property.) In response to the central committee’s conservativeness, Lenin wrote the April theses, which agreed in essence with Trotsky’s analysis. He was even prepared to break discipline in order to appeal over the heads of the central committee to the most advanced workers.
Was Lenin threatened with expulsion for this indiscipline? Of course he wasn’t.
By October, after Lenin had won a majority, there were Bolsheviks who argued publicly against the insurrection. Were even these comrades expelled? No they were not.
Nor did the Bolsheviks always vote rigidly as a bloc within the soviets. The disciplined democratic centralism of the Bolsheviks, which is so poorly understood by many of those who describe themselves as Leninists, has to be understood not in the abstract but in the real historical context in which it operated, i.e. as a means of defending the party from a highly repressive Tsarist state apparatus. It was not intended as a means of constraining party members to the extent that they would appear as a monolithic bloc within the workers movement.
I am sure the point I am making here has not escaped you, comrades. It is that the Bolsheviks enjoyed a vibrant and dynamic internal life and were exceedingly tolerant of dissent, even when that dissent was expressed publicly.
On the subject of the behaviour of Bolsheviks within the soviets, Colin later remarked that: “Some people didn’t like the Bolsheviks, just as some people don’t like the SWP. Some of them are even here tonight,” which of course earned a big laugh. Aside from the fact that such remarks are intended to make people from other tendencies feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, which is disingenuous when you have advertised the meeting as a public one, it does betray an element of paranoia. It’s not that we don’t like you, comrades; it’s that on some issues we sometimes disagree with you. Is that so hard to bear?
And I don’t think the analogy between the Bolsheviks and the SWP was entirely accidental either. The entire tenor of the meeting seemed intended to imply that Bolshevik Party = SWP. It is perfectly conceivable that your current may constitute a part of some future mass revolutionary party. But if you actually believe that you are already there, that the SWP is the last word in Bolshevism, that you can safely insulate yourselves from every other strand of Marxist thinking, that every other Marxist current is wrong and you are right, then quite frankly you are deluding yourselves.
I was also surprised to hear Colin confirm in his speech that your group is clinging to the view that the Soviet Union was state capitalist. Although this simplistic view (“neither Washington nor Moscow”) may have helped you in the seventies and eighties to become the largest left group in politically backward Britain (and let’s not forget that the largest left group in pre-1914 Russia wasn’t the Bolsheviks, it was the Mensheviks,) this analysis simply doesn’t bear up to any historical scrutiny. Can you still not see that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a catastrophic defeat of the entire working class, not just within its own territory but globally? What are conditions like now for workers in Uzbekistan , in Kazakhstan , in Russia itself? And how did we get to where we are now, with the most unfavourable balance of forces in living memory, other than via the smashing of the Soviet Union and the subsequent global hegemony of imperialism? An organisation which clings to its old orthodoxy in the face of all the evidence of history has more in common with a religious sect than with the party of Lenin.
These are just some of the issues that we need to discuss and debate comrades, in an open, serious, mature and comradely manner. That is how we educate ourselves as Marxists. That is how we develop our ideas and our theory. Don’t isolate yourselves from the rest of the left in the mistaken belief that isolation will allow you to get on with building the revolutionary party, free from the irritation of people disagreeing with you.
I hope you will take these remarks in the comradely spirit in which they are intended.
Roy
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